


Paradiso Distrutto

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Allegory, Angst, Biblical References, Execution, Kidnapping, Post-Canon, Post-Series, Rescue, Rescue Missions, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:18:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: None. - Warning
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3167942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Moreau leaves prison and takes Hardison away from the Leverage team, Eliot sets out to finish the dance he and Damien began so many years earlier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paradiso Distrutto

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lokobookworm95](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokobookworm95/gifts).



> Thank you for playing with us lokobookworm95! I had a lot of fun writing this one - I hope you enjoy it!

Stories are never written about the day Lucifer returns to paradise.

The return flight to San Lorenzo is a journey Eliot never would have made without provocation, but this time God has overreached. Damien Moreau has extended his hand into the heart of Eliot’s family and taken Hardison for his own. It is an offense that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.

Nate has already made the expected arguments. It is the mastermind’s curse – fate has handed him the human equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and while he loves Eliot as strongly as any of the others, he fears the power Eliot gives him.

This time though, the decision is not his to make. Eliot has proven on more than one occasion that he is willing to die for the family. This time, in order to set the world right again, he must be willing to kill for them. Damien Moreau has been a sword at their throat for too long; if Eliot has his way, that ends tonight.

President Vittori, the schoolteacher made king, meets him at the plane full of apologies and self-recrimination. His regrets fill Eliot’s ears with no more effect than water across ancient stone – if he is being honest with himself, Eliot has been expecting this day or one very like it since the moment Damien’s cell door closed. No prison was ever going to hold Damien Moreau for long, not if he didn’t wish to be held.

What he does accept from Vittori is worth much more than the man’s regrets. Surveillance photos of the villa Moreau has reclaimed for himself – dozens of them, showing Eliot that the God of his past is nothing more than a man who refuses to evolve. Guards move around the perimeter in patterns Eliot himself set in motion decades earlier, they stand at posts he prescribed for them. It is no great leap of logic to assume the patterns inside the house run true.

Electronic surveillance will be tight, but the construction of it does not concern Eliot. Not this time – he wants Moreau to know who is coming, and he wants him to know why.

The final piece is pure poetry: a 9mm Sig Sauer he took off the body of Myles Chapman in a warehouse in Washington DC. Eliot knows, although he cannot tell you _how_ he knows, that this is the weapon _he_ carried in Damien’s service. It is too much like Moreau for it not to be, passing the gun from King’s Champion to King’s Champion like some ancient blade in an even more ancient tale.

He doesn’t know why he isn’t surprised to find Nate waiting at the car Vittori has given him for his drive to Damien’s villa. He should be surprised. He should be angry. He should be a dozen other things, but he simply nods at his liege lord and announces, “You’re driving.”

Inside the sinfully luxurious SUV, Nate passes him a tablet. It holds all the secrets Eliot was missing about the interior of the house (of course it does). Specs on the alarm and electrical system, two dozen potential access points, and most importantly – Hardison’s last known location. His prison is spacious and likely well-appointed. Eliot finds himself sketching in the details left out by the infra-red camera ; comfortable and luxurious because Damien will still have left Hardison the illusion he has a choice in this game.

Pawns never have a choice – they are too valuable to be allowed to say no.

“You’ll see him out,” he says once he has digested the new information. It catches somewhere between a question and a command, and Eliot finds himself wondering how Nate will answer.

“See you both out,” is the response. There will be no either/or here, and Eliot understands that Nate will kill himself to make sure those he’s made himself responsible for walk out of paradise whole.

“Are you armed?”

Nate reaches into a pocket – Eliot expects to see his father’s ancient silver revolver. The mastermind carries it like a holy relic these days, a reminder of the life that will still have him if he ever chooses to answer the call of his blood.

What he takes out instead for Eliot’s inspection is a 9mm killing device of unimaginable grace and power. “You ever fired it?” he asks, turning the weapon over in his hands. His skin itches to take it apart, to reduce it to useless bits of metal and plastic, but if Nate answers his question correctly it will do the job they need it to do.

“Trained, certified, practice at least twice a month,” is the mastermind’s response, along with the unspoken rebuke for Eliot daring to question him on this. Eliot doesn’t apologize – that isn’t his job. Making sure the people he loves don’t go down to friendly fire or overreaching arrogance is.

He holds onto the weapon for one question more. “Can you kill with it?”

Nate holds out his hand. “If I wasn’t willing to follow your orders, I wouldn’t have come.”

The men at the gate have to die. Eliot understands that not all Damien’s men are monsters, but if they take the time to cull the guilty from the less so, Hardison will be lost. His concession is to make it quick on all of them, which means he takes the shots himself.

“No more than two shots per man,” he tells Nate as they leave the SUV. Five minutes before the deaths are discovered – five minutes to say everything he needs to say. “One’s better, but a wounded man can raise the alarm. You get in, you get to Hardison and you get out like I showed you.”

They move smoothly towards the front door of the villa. This will be a noisy assault, masking a quiet extraction. Eliot’s aim is to draw Moreau’s men inward – angels of death retreating to protect their God.

It works at first. _Two…five…ten…eighteen…nineteen…_ He and Nate separate at the top of the grand staircase, neither looking back, neither daring to say goodbye. Eliot is surprised when Nate lets him go without a final command to return home in one piece, but he supposes there comes a time when even a mastermind understands that he can’t control destiny.

 _Twenty-three…twenty-six…thirty…_ “I knew you would come.” It ends in Damien’s library, almost before Eliot is ready for it. Moreau is a God of routine after all, and his evening cognac a holy ritual. “I put your favorite beer on ice.” As always, the word is a sneering insult in Damien’s mouth – the one piece of Eliot he was never able to reshape in his own perfect image.

It is said by those who know that Lucifer was the one who loved God best. They say that at the height of his betrayal, when he rejected everything God held dear, there was a part of him that still wished nothing more than to fall to his knees and beg forgiveness.

So it was that Eliot’s gun trembled in his hand as took aim one final time…so it was that his tears softened the moment of truth.

“You won’t,” Damien said.

They were the final words he ever spoke.


End file.
